Cognitive modeling for agent-based simulation of child maltreatment and child maltreatment prevention

Agent-based simulation is a useful tool for studying complex social and public health systems. The bottom up modeling approach of agent-based models makes it easy to model individual behaviors and their interactions within a complex system. One of the principles of agent-based modeling is to keep each agent relatively simple (e.g., specified by a set of rules), in the hope that the many agents and their interactions, although each of which is simple, can lead to complex emergent behavior at the system level. The degree of simplicity (or complexity) of each individual agent is application-dependent. For many social and public health systems, since each agent represents an individual person, it is often necessary to model the cognitive states and processes of individuals in order to adequately capture the dynamics of the system. In this talk, I will present our work of cognitive modeling for agent-based simulating of child maltreatment and child maltreatment prevention.